‘You can never be relaxed’: the Borodin Quartet’s high wire act

String quartets come and go fairly quickly. Orchestras endure for centuries, but 40 years is a good run for a quartet. But no other quartet can quite match the record of the Borodin Quartet, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary season this year. For 62 of those years, it had Valentin Berlinsky as its cellist. He succeeded the short stint of the original cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, and stayed until 2007.

The group, says viola player Igor Naidin, is definitely different from what it was 20 or 50 years ago. But he hopes it still has “the same roots, the same tradition”, and that the style and outlook is still based on what was built up throughout the decades.

The two longest-serving players are Naidin and the leader, Ruben Aharonian, who have been with the group for just under two decades. This means “all of the players, all of the personalities, all of the instruments are different to 20 years ago”.

All players in the history of the Borodin String Quartet have a similar educational background: they have all studied at the Moscow Conservatory.

When it comes to new members, Naidan says frankly that “no one is ever precisely what’s needed”. At trial rehearsals they try to figure out “if this individual can see how we feel the music, and play it that way, and at the same time whether they will be able to adapt to the style of the group, the technical equipment, the sound quality, and if he or she can adapt to the traditions of the Borodin Quartet.”

Cellist Vladimir Balshin had lots of experience inside the group before he formally became a member. He stood in for founding member Valentin Berlinsky – always reverentially referred to as Mr Berlinsky – in the latter’s final days with the group, when illness prevented him playing in particular concerts.

There have been, Naidin says, “many wonderful musicians, wonderful instrumentalists, who have been tried out in my time, and some of them just didn’t fit at all. It might be that their particular sound would never match the current one, and they had to be rejected. Some of them understood this perfectly well themselves, too.”

Listen for the click

Musical relationships can be just like any other kind of relationship. Some people click right away. With others it can take time. And playing string quartets, says Naidin, “is absolutely a matter of constant adjustment. You can never feel relaxed. I think every quartet player will confirm this. It’s impossible to sit back in your chair and relax. It’s just impossible.

“You can’t nail everything down. Each performance, each rehearsal, no matter how many times you’ve played the composition, you must be 100 per cent, 200 per cent alert as to what is going on. You have to have your ears on stalks, even with colleagues you know so well that you are fairly sure what’s likely to happen.”

It is, he says, “the most ungrateful chamber-music formation. You can never be relaxed. But it’s also the most beautiful and the most remarkable. And musical history proves that through the heritage that’s been created over the centuries.”

The memories of joining seem to be altogether more specific for Balshin. “The very first step for the newcomer is just to do the best that you can, and keep your nose up to sniff what’s going around. Try to keep up with things. Try to understand. Try not to interfere. Do no harm. Then one can become more brave, more active, and reveal more of yourself, in the knowledge of what’s going on already. And then, finally, you get to where you can have an overview of what’s going on while you’re actually playing. You can see from the inside, and you can see from above. And eventually you become absorbed by the rest of the group, so you no longer feel like an artificial limb of some kind.”

Some time after he joined, he says, he got a compliment from the then second violinist, Andrei Abramenkov, who told him that he felt like his own hand or his leg. So he knew he was going in the right direction.

It helps, of course, that everyone plays from the group’s existing copies of the music, parts that have markings made on them over decades, some of them written down at the suggestion of the composers themselves. When they get too worn to use, the markings are transferred into new copies.

“There are many, many things encoded there,” says Naidin. “The difficulty is that we have to decipher the information. You can pass on bowings, markings and fingerings, but, without the proper knowledge as to how to use them, it would be hopeless. You still have to read between the lines.”

In his case it helps that, as a student in another quartet, he was tutored by Dmitri Shebalin, the viola-player he eventually succeeded in the Borodin Quartet.

Handwritten copies

Some of the quartet’s parts are handwritten copies dating from before the rise of photocopying. And on the back of one of Balshin’s parts are schedule details from 1964 and the phone number of the great viola player and conductor Rudolf Barshai in Switzerland. Not something you would want to rub out, he says.

The deaths of Berlinsky in 2008 and Shebalin two years ago, were, says Naidin, a bit like losing your parents. Quite apart from the personal loss, there was also the loss of heritage and lore, and the loss of possible answers to questions you never knew you would ever come to ask.

Balshin cracks a joke when asked how musical life and music education size up in modern Russia and the West compared with the old Soviet system.

The old structure has disappeared, and the state no longer cares the way it did before the collapse of communism, he says. But today, Russians can travel and study with anybody, anywhere in the world. And then he says, laughing, “maybe things are actually better in the West, because so many Russian teachers are working there”.

Naidin says there is actually a new balance in Russia, given that so many foreigners, from Asia as well as Europe, go there to study.

Balshin and Naidin will be giving masterclasses to young quartets at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. In young ensembles, they like to find what they call “a love for string quartet music-making itself” – they say this as if they’re talking about a vocation as extreme and pure as a monk with a vow of silence – and they quote Berlinsky, who liked to say that in order to play quartets you first need to be infected with the string quartet virus.

They want young quartets to approach the music with “clean hands . . . like a surgeon. No matter what the result will be, you begin with clean hands.”

They want to steer young players away from the idea that you can do whatever you want with a piece of music. They’re not just masters of tradition and they don’t just want to preserve it: they want to pass it on to the next generation too.

• The Borodin Quartet play works by Borodin, Shostakovich, and Glinka at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, which runs in Bantry from Friday, June 26th, to Saturday, July 4th; westcorkmusic.ie, 1850-788789